“I think the outside of the house as well worth seeing as any part of it,” said Mr Greville. “It is so well situated, and seen from the high road it looks very well indeed. By-the-bye, I shall be driving that way this afternoon if any of you young ladies care to come with me in the dog-cart? I am going on to Little Bexton, but if you don’t care to come so far, I could drop you about Romary, and you could walk back. The country is not pretty after that. Would you like to come, Frances? Cecilia has a cold, I hear.”
“Yes,” said Cecilia, “but not a very bad one. But I don’t think either of us can go, Mr Greville, for Miss Bentley is coming to see us this afternoon, and we must not be out.”
“Mary, then?” said Mr Greville.
Mary’s heart was beating fast, and she was almost afraid that the tremble in her voice was perceptible as she replied that she would enjoy the drive very much, she was sure.
“But I will not go all the way to Little Bexton, I think, if you don’t mind dropping me on the road. I should like the walk home,” she said to Mr Greville, and so it was decided. And for a wonder nothing came in the way.
It was years and years since Mary had been at Romary. When Mr Greville “dropped her” on the road, at a point about half a mile beyond the lodge gates, all about her seemed so strange and unfamiliar that she could scarcely believe she had ever been there before. Strange and unfamiliar, even though she was not more than ten miles from her own home, and though the general features of the landscape were the same. For to a real dweller in the country, differences and variations, which by a casual visitor are unobservable, are extraordinarily obtrusive. Mary had lived all her life at Hathercourt, and knew its fields and its trees, its cottages and lanes, as accurately as the furniture of her mother’s drawing-room. It was strange to her to meet even a dog on the road whose ownership she was unacquainted with, and when a countryman or two passed her with half a stare of curiosity instead of the familiar “Good-day to you, Miss Mary,” she felt herself “very far west” indeed, and instinctively hastened her steps.
“It is a good thing no one does know me about here,” she said to herself; “but how strange it seems! What a different life we have led from most people nowadays! I dare say it would never occur to Miss Cheviott, for instance, to think it at all strange to meet people on the road whose names and histories she knew nothing of. Young as she is, I dare say she has more friends and acquaintances than she can remember. How different from Lilias and me—ah, yes, it is that that makes what her brother has done so awfully wrong—so mean—but will he understand? Shall I be able to show it him?”
Mary stopped short—she was close to the lodge gates now. She stood still for a moment in a sort of silence of excitement and determination—then resolutely walked on again and hesitated no more. These Romary lodge gates had become to her a Rubicon.
It was a quarter of a mile at least from the gates to the house, but to Mary it seemed scarcely half a dozen yards. As in a dream she walked on steadily, heedless of the scene around her, that at another time would have roused her keen admiration—the beautiful old trees, beautiful even in leafless February; the wide stretching park with its gentle ups and downs and far-off boundary of forestland; the wistful-eyed deer, too tame to be scared by her approach; the sudden vision of a rabbit scuttering across her path—Mary saw none of them. Only once as she stood still for an instant to unlatch a gate in the wire fence inclosing the grounds close to the house, she looked round her and her gaze rested on a cluster of oaks at a little distance.
“When I see that clump of trees next,” she said to herself, “it will be over, and I shall know Lilias’s fate.”